This is the Cater Daily podcast for Wednesday, February 26, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Despite the simple stories to the contrary, research shows that American workers often suffer when foreign workers are deported.

And it's in a wider variety of ways than you might think.

Cater Scott Linsicum comments.

So, Scott, step one, deport a lot of people who are not here in the United States legally.

Step two. a lot of the jobs those people were doing come open.

And step three, presumably these are a lot of jobs that Americans don't like for whatever reason.

And so wages in those jobs go way up.

American worker wins the end.

Have you heard that story?

Oh, you hear it a lot.

And you certainly heard it in the 2024 presidential campaign, especially from like J.D. Vance would say things like,

oh, there are millions of American workers, you know, waiting, just itching to take these jobs.

You reduce immigration. You have this, you know, jobs boom for the forgotten men and

women of America, right? Um, the reality The reality, however, is a little bit different

from that description. And, you know, I dug through a lot of the economics research for a recent

column looking at past deportation initiatives in the United States, Because we've had several. This current one is,

of course, not our first. And the economics literature on deportations is pretty uniformly

counter to the Vance Trump narrative about, you know, how deportations and restrictions on immigration

are actually going to benefit American workers. In reality, we found, these studies have found

repeatedly that American workers actually end up worse off because of these wide-scale deportations

...